Political scientist and media critic

September 28, 2012

Presentation on improving coverage of misinformation

On Wednesday, I spoke at an Annenberg Public Policy Center event at the National Press Club on "How Can Journalists Increase the Likelihood That the Facts Will Win Out?" For those who are interested, the C-SPAN video of my talk (approximately ten minutes) is here and the slides that I used are here.

Comments

IMHO Brendan's suggestions are good ones. I think another key suggestion would be for the media to gain credibility with conservatives by dropping their big liberal bias. Today, many conservatives seen the mainstream media the way liberals see Rush Limbaugh. Consider two recent examples of media bias:

1. Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren apparently has been practicing law without a proper law license. This should be a big story, but the mainstream media have shunned it.

2. Consider the myth that the attack in Benghezi was a riot, rather than a planned, organized attack. This myth was specifically spread by the Obama Admistration for the first week or more after the attack. Although the Administration is backtracking (or partially backtracking), no doubt many Americans believe the myth.

Where are the surveys showing what percentage of American believe this myth? Where are the calls to name and shame UN Representative Susan Rice for spreading this myth on Meet the Press?

We’re entering territory we have never entered before. We’ve never had a situation where the press has purposefully decided to pick up a narrative from the White House to not tell people things that happened in order to support their overwhelming candidate for president, Barack Obama.

This isn’t about partisanship, this is about danger. He equated the media to “Pravda,” a newspaper which was owned and operated by the state in the Soviet Union.

Because the media is this far out, they have little ability to correct false beliefs held by conseratives. Conservatives have written the mainstrem media off as unreliable.